Triple Witch (7 page)

12
Later that evening, upstairs with Wade, in the dark:

“Move your elbow a little, will you?” I said. “Right, that’s better.”

We’d nixed the champagne—Victor’s presence in the house would probably just make the bubbles go flat, anyway—and then Monday had decided to get up on the bed with us, so now the three of us lay companionably under the quilt.

“I’m going out in a couple of hours,” Wade said.

To work, he meant; to go out on the water. The tug often went out to meet a freighter while it was still dark.

A breeze moved the curtains, moonlight shifting in the lace. A foghorn honked at the lighthouse a couple of miles away. Wade put his arms around Monday and me, gathering us in. “Don’t worry.”

A week earlier, a freighter had capsized off Newfoundland: five saved, sixteen lost. There had been film of the awash vessel on Canadian TV, the craft moving helplessly, being swallowed.

“I won’t worry.” I made myself smile when I said it.

If anyone is safe out on the water, it is Wade; that’s well known. He will come home if anyone does. There is not a woman in town who would say any differently. Then again, there’s not a woman in town who will speak of capsizing, who will say the word aloud, not even if you pulled her fingernails out with pliers.

Which reminded me: “Listen, if Ken’s boat was adrift, how did his killer get to shore?” Not by swimming; the water was too cold.

Wade’s shoulder shifted. “Another boat?”

“Maybe.” But it meant Ken had let someone aboard. From listening to Wade, I knew boarding another guy’s boat was nearly impossible without that guy’s cooperation.

On the other hand, maybe Ken didn’t know Forepaugh meant any harm. Ike could have stolen a boat, then put it back afterwards.

“You located,” Wade asked drowsily, “those shutters?”

I found his hand and held it. “Over in Dennysville, some guy remodeling a house. I talked to George when he came to take Ellie home, and he says there are shutters in the Dumpster, out back.”

I felt Wade nodding in the dark. “Yeah, I know the place. Guy’s got every tradesman in town on the job, turn that farmhouse into a palace. You might know him, up from New York. Somebody in the Waco says the guy was a stockbroker, ran into some trouble.”

A little pang of something nudged me, but I ignored it. Lots of stockbrokers have run into trouble; it didn’t mean anything.

“Funny name, the guys said he had. Something like a tree.”

The pang sharpened. It couldn’t be. Could it?

“… birch, alder …”

Sure it could. With Victor around, anything could happen. The man spread disaster like a head cold.

“… willow. That’s it—Willoughby. Do you know him?”

Down the hall, Sam slept the untroubled sleep of adolescence, out like a light the minute his head hit the pillow, while in the guest room Victor tossed and moaned, misery seeping from his pores.

“Baxter Willoughby,” I said resignedly.

Suddenly, Wade’s last waking defenses fell; his breathing deepened, becoming even and slow, and I felt him slide away into unconsciousness. Monday slept, too, paws twitching as she chased, with dreaming whimpers, a dream rabbit.

Which left me alone, thinking about Ken, Hallie, and Tim. By now Ken’s body was in Bangor, awaiting forensic autopsy. Timothy was back on Crow Island, grieving for his son. And where Hallie Quinn might have gotten to by now, I didn’t even want to imagine.

And then there was Baxter Willoughby, on account of whom my planned expedition to Dennysville didn’t seem quite so promising.

I’d never met him, but I knew him well in the way that a skilled accountant knows you by examining your bank records, charge accounts, brokers’ statements, and tax filings. I knew of every insurance claim he’d ever made, every parking ticket he’d gotten, the names of his children and the address of the vet where his wife took their miniature Schnauzers to be spayed.

He’d been a crooked trader—his name, in fact, had become synonymous with the breed—and when the SEC had gotten wind of him, they’d called me: fast, accurate, discreet.

I’d spent a year creating a flow chart so detailed, it looked like a map of the New York subway system. I’d had phone records, appointment calendars, even the
contents of his wastebaskets, all collected by an army of SEC snoops; for twelve months, if Willoughby dropped a tissue, somebody picked it up.

The point of it all was to prove the SEC’s suspicions: that over a period of approximately fifteen years, Baxter Willoughby had bilked a whole range of victims out of millions of dollars.

My job was to prove it, and when I was finished, Willoughby went to jail.

13
Early the next morning, I found the paint scraper I’d been using on the kitchen floor and took it out to the backyard, along with a cup of coffee. Hummingbirds flitted among the dahlias in the garden while I spread newspapers along the stone foundation of the house, then began scraping clapboards.

It was too late to get Bill Twitchell to come over, with his mile-high ladders and space-age grinders, to scrape and paint the whole house before Felicity got here. But I could get the loose paint off in spots that were low enough for me to reach, and cover the bare wood with white-tinted shellac. That would protect the wood, and make things look spiffier for Felicity.

I kept scraping until my arm began aching and the rest of the world began stirring: cars starting, dogs barking, the big white garbage truck with the moose painted on the side of it, rumbling down the street.

Trash day: I’d forgotten it. I scrambled to haul the garbage cans out to the curbside, just as Al Rollins swung off the back of the truck to empty them toward the receptacle’s gaping maw.

“ ‘Morning, Al. Thanks very much.”

He muttered a reply, his normally cheerful face clouded.

“Something wrong?” Al’s good nature is a given, around town.

“Aw, them illegal dumpers got me hopping. Too cheap to get trash picked up like normal people. They go out, dump it in the woods someplace, make a big mess. Then town hall hires me to go get it. And I don’t mind telling you it’s a lot more trouble, at the end of some godforsaken dirt track out in the wilderness.”

“I’m sorry about that, Al. Want coffee? I’ve got some fresh.” Al’s pleasant manner has cheered me up on plenty of occasions; I figured the least I could do was return the favor.

“Nah, thanks.” He waved at the rest of the street, with the trash cans lined up neatly at the end of each front sidewalk.

“Worst part is, they got me goin’ through the stuff. You know,” he added at my look of puzzlement, “to find out who it is, doin’ the dumping. Boy, what a lousy chore.”

“Ick. Well, I hope it lets up soon. And look at it this way, when you find out who’s doing it, Arnold will make them stop.”

He brightened minutely. “Yeah, that’s right, isn’t it? Well, see you next week.” He swung aboard the truck and signaled to his driver.

“Yeah, see you,” I called as it rumbled away. Al’s comments about trash-sorting reminded me of Baxter Willoughby, whose trash had been gone through so exhaustively by the SEC investigators, and whose Dumpster was one of the tasks on my agenda for today.

But I wasn’t ready to confront any of them yet, so as the garbage truck turned the corner I went inside, got Monday’s leash, and took her for a walk along the waterfront.

The air was cool, smelling of chamomile and salt threaded with a hint of woodsmoke; gulls, swooping
and soaring over the water, cried raucous warnings to cormorants diving for minnows under the dock. Monday sniffed appreciatively as we passed the Waco Diner, pouring forth a powerful aroma of coffee and pancakes.

Meanwhile, I pretended our walk had to do with me being a good dog owner. But I was really only putting off the inevitable.

The SEC guys had sworn up and down that no one would ever know I’d helped them get Baxter Willoughby. More to the point, they’d sworn up and down that he wouldn’t.

Pretty soon, though, I’d find out how good their promises were: good enough to get me onto Willoughby’s place—and off again—with four dozen pairs of wooden shutters the cost of which, if I had to buy them new, would pay off the national debt?

Or only good enough to get me chased off, with Willoughby reading me a profane riot act as I fled?

On Water Street, Henry Wadsworth had unfurled the green-striped awning over the hardware store window. Margaret Smythe was watering the red geraniums in the planters outside Bay Books. And on the boat dock an army of yellow forklifts beetled around the Quonset warehouse, getting ready for the cargo freighter which was due in soon.

Over it all hung the fresh smell of seawater and an air of incalculable good fortune, the golden state of grace that was an island summer in Maine. So why did I feel so lousy?

Not, I realized, because of Willoughby and the shutters. It was on account of Victor.

Wade and Ellie were right: after the way he’d treated me over the years, my ex-husband deserved a kick in the pants. Instead I was behaving passively, telling myself it was easier than fighting with him—after all, he wouldn’t be here forever—and that maybe it would help Sam keep a good relationship with his father.

But the truth was harder and deeper: I loathed knowing I’d been so stupid as to marry him, and disliked other people knowing it even more. Treating him as he deserved, especially in front of witnesses, felt like admitting the kind of mistake whose memory—even years later—can stop you in your tracks, quivering with shamed embarrassment.

Also, I liked being the good guy, the one who could not be accused of keeping an argument going, much less starting it. This, I had to admit to myself, was also part of the reason I’d never dished any real dirt about Victor to Sam. Victor’s “heart attack,” for instance, when I told him I was leaving …

But no, I wasn’t going to start thinking about that. What I needed was to behave like a vertebrate, or Wade and Ellie—and probably Sam, too—would lose a lot of respect for me.

As I would for myself …

“Hey!” The greeting roused me gratefully from my musings; it was Bob Arnold, coming out of police headquarters.

The dog and I crossed the street to meet him, and he rocked back and forth on his shiny black shoes as I told him that Ellie and I had gotten the things Tim wanted, and would be taking them out to him on Crow Island later in the day.

“Ayuh,” he replied, his freshly shaven cheeks looking babyish in the morning sunshine. “That’s fine. I got a call from the boys down to Augusta, too, you might want to tell Ellie. They confirmed who that friend of Ken’s must have been, that old Tim figures was the one who shot him.”

He stuck a toothpick in his mouth and chewed stolidly on it, wanting a cigarette and as always determined not to have one.

“I mean that Forepaugh fellow,” he went on. “We’ll pick him up, I don’t doubt, and I’m going to have another
look at Ken’s boat, see if there’s any evidence Ken was doing anything he shouldn’t have been.”

I nodded. Something, he meant, that Forepaugh might have wanted to horn in on, like a boatload of smuggled drugs.

“Doubt there will be, though,” Arnold added. “You kill a fellow, stands to reason you clean up anything points to your motive, doesn’t it?”

“I guess. Who gets the boat?” I wondered aloud. Other than the trailer, which was pretty decrepit and sitting on rented land, it was the only thing of value that Ken had possessed.

Arnold shrugged. “Tim. Or maybe Ken’s cousin, Ned. Whichever one of ’em wants it.”

He considered this further. “Probably,” he decided finally, “it’ll be Ned. Crow Island’s got a deep enough cove on the north side, bring ‘er in, but I doubt old Tim wants the trouble of it, with his foot all bunged up the way it is. And the boat needs a good bit of repair, too. When the state cops hauled it out, they found a big ding in her hull, below the water line.”

“Huh,” I said. “Any idea how the killer got to shore?”

Arnold shook his head. “Couple possibilities, one being an accomplice.”

Monday snorted along the sidewalk, snuffling up bits of old chewing gum and any other items that were even remotely edible.

“Ken had a nice inflatable rubber dinghy stuffed away in the hold,” Arnold mused further. “Whoever killed him didn’t take it. Maybe didn’t find it. Or didn’t need it. Whichever.”

“There was a girl out at Ken’s trailer,” I said, thinking about the idea of an accomplice.

“Yeah, I know. Hallie Quinn. State boys want to talk to her, too, but she lit out before they could nab her, yesterday. They’ll get her, though. Unless,” he added, “I get her, first.”

I looked questioningly at him while Monday ate an apple core.

“Her parents have been on me like flypaper,” he explained, “to bring her home. Not that they’re model citizens, never mind the good front they put up.”

“She looks as if she might be having some trouble.”

“Uh-huh. Like the desert’s got sand. You don’t have to dance around it. Her folks’ve told me they think she’s on something.”

“That’s the reason they want her back?”

He nodded unhappily. “One of ’em. It’s the reason I can agree with, anyway. Mostly, it seems like they think she’s gotten above herself. Gotten snotty, is how they put it. Or her old man did.”

He looked at me, his pale blue eyes undeceived. “You know, if you’d grown up here, you might not think it was heaven on earth the way you do. Damn near fallen off the edge of the world, we’re so far away from everything. No excitement, not many jobs, and the ones that there are, they are awfully damned hard work.”

He shook his head, turning to gaze out across the flat, blue water to Campobello. “Fine place if you’ve got a little money, or a way to get some.” It wasn’t a dig at me, just the simple truth.

“But what girl you think is going to like it,” he went on, “hip deep in the cold mud, makin’ a living filling a clam bucket, and in winter she wrecks her hands tying Christmas wreaths?”

“I know. It isn’t easy.” That was one reason Felicity Abbot-Jones’s visit was no joke; Eastport wasn’t Camden or Bar Harbor. We needed the money she controlled.